Confederate Statues and White Supremacist Attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia
In 2012, then vice-mayor Kristin Szakos, who is white, asked historian Ed Ayers at a Festival of the Book forum in Charlottesville whether it was time to talk about taking down two statues memorializing Confederate Generals R. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson or balancing them out in some way. That question alone was enough to generate an audible gasp from the audience and, soon after, personal attacks on Ms. Szakos, including hate calls to her home phone. Several months later, two University of Virginia students convened a dialogue about the statues that focused on understanding a range of concerns and values; the dialogue attracted about fifteen people and led to no follow-up.
The first known inhabitants of the location now known as Charlottesville, Virginia were Monacan Indians in a settlement called Monasukapanough. To the dismay of at least some residents, little is known and nothing recognized of these people. The City itself was chartered in 1762 as the seat of Albemarle County, although both the City and County are independent government entities.
Charlottesville is recognized internationally primarily as the home of Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello overlooks the City some three miles away. Although the homes of Presidents Madison and Monroe, Montpelier and Highland respectively, are even farther away, the other two former Presidents are claimed locally as Charlottesville residents too, and statues of the three presidents may be viewed along an exterior wall of City Hall.
The most visible and dominant statuary in Charlottesville, however, does not belong to any of these presidents and “Founding Fathers.” Rather, they are statues and parks dedicated to Confederate Generals who had no history of association with Charlottesville: R. E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. And while other Charlottesville statues have generated controversy at various times, particularly the statues of George Rogers Clark as “Conqueror of the Northwest” and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark overseeing a crouching Sacajawea, it is the Lee and Jackson statues that in 2016 generated intense interest and conflict.
For those who seek removal of the statues, these memorials are painful reminders of the violence and injustice of slavery and other harms of white supremacy that are best removed from public spaces. For others, change is challenged as a revisionist effort to rewrite history, and an attack on fundamental values represented in the personal character of Lee and of Jackson. Still others argue that it is precisely because the memorials evoke reminders of this shameful past—and the legacies of this past continue to cause harms—that we need to transform them in place so that they serve as a visible public reminder of the scale and endurance of those harms, while at the same time making clear our rejection of those harms.
On May 28, 2016, Charlottesville’s City Council created the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces to “provide Council with options for telling the full story of Charlottesville’s history of race and for changing the City’s narrative through our public spaces.” The commission was charged with providing options to Council for specific ways in which public spaces are used, or could be used, to address race, including relocating or adding context to existing Confederate statues.
The Commission reached full consensus on all recommendations that did not involve the statues. These included the following:
- Promoting research on the racial history of Charlottesville;
- Development of relevant curricular materials for local schools;
- Making visible interpretation of a Court Square slave auction block and memorializing those who were enslaved in the Charlottesville area;
- Marking the 1898 lynching of resident John Henry James by participation in the Equal Justice Initiative's Memorial to Peace and Justice;
- Completion of a proposed Vinegar Hill park commemorating a largely African American neighborhood destroyed by urban renewal;
- Highlighting and linking several historical places; and
- Proclaiming March 3 as either Liberation Day or Freedom Day in an annual commemoration of the date in 1865 when Union troops set free the majority of the area’s population.
Regarding the statues, the Commission reached full consensus on three guiding principles:
- The Lee and Jackson statues belong in no public space unless their history as symbols of white supremacy is revealed, and their respective parks are transformed in ways that promote freedom and equity in our community;
- Neither statue should be removed without keeping them accessible to view in Charlottesville; and
- Neither statue should be moved without the vacated space being redesigned such that the history of the statues’ design, erection, existence and reason for removal is made highly visible so that this history is not hidden.
In the only votes that were not unanimous, the Commission also agreed to forward two options to Council concerning the two monuments. For the Lee sculpture, a 7 to 2 majority voted that it would be appropriate to move it to McIntire Park (a much larger City park named after the statue’s donor and already containing a Vietnam War memorial) and to confront its history there in a new context. By a 5 to 4 majority members also voted that it would also be appropriate to confront the Lee sculpture in place by redesigning and transforming Lee Park. For the Jackson statue, an 8 to 1 majority voted to keep it in its current setting and transform its presentation. The Commission also voted unanimously to recommend renaming the two parks.
This case is ripe with many lessons of what was done well and what fell short.
Done well:
The Commission conducted significant community outreach:
- The Commission held 17 meetings after work hours and at a variety of locations around Charlottesville in order to make it easier for members of the public to attend and comment;
- 20 minutes of each two-hour meeting was dedicated to community input (at all but one of its meetings), with 10 minutes set aside at the beginning of each meeting and 10 at the end;
- Three two-hour community forums were held, with two of them including facilitated small groups;
- An open tour of various historical sites including the parks containing the Lee and Jackson statues took place on a Saturday morning; and
- A Commission email address was established, enabling the submission of many dozens of comments and ideas.
Recognizing that work would need to be done outside of the meetings of the entire Commission, members developed four workgroups. These were:
- Public Engagement - This subcommittee prepared plans for a public engagement strategy, organized public meeting facilitators, set public meeting agendas, and set the format for the first two community forums.
- Case Studies - This subcommittee researched the decisions and results of other cities’ efforts to address similar questions about race, memorials, and public spaces.
- Inventory of Historic Sites - This subcommittee created an inventory of historic sites related to the city’s African American history.
- Historical Context and Background - This subcommittee examined the broad history of inventoried sites in Charlottesville and explored the “hidden” history of the city.
The Commission invited presentations by noted designers and historians and heard from City legal counsel about legal issues. Several senior staff including the City Manager, Deputy City Manager, and Director of Charlottesville’s Human Rights Commission attended almost all meetings. The final report was drafted by a member who had considerable experience writing professional reports, and was reviewed thoroughly by Commission members. The final report is thorough, well written, and well documented with an extensive appendix
Falling short
However, thoughtful organization and extensive outreach notwithstanding, the process left room for improvement.
Although almost all meetings were recorded, the absence of meeting summaries meant there was no way for people to understand what the Commission had done, unless one attended meetings or listened to the meeting recordings. This gap led to numerous inaccurate reports on social media of Commission actions even among those paying close attention. It also let to the omission of some votes at the final meeting from the final report published on the City’s website.
Responding to the emails was left up to individual Commission members. This left the many members of the public who wrote the Commission with no formal or consistent way of knowing that their messages were received, much less considered.
Criteria for selection of Commission members by City Council was not shared, nor was there any assurance of diverse and representative views. The Commission did not include any native Charlottesvillians, and some members had lived in the area only a short period of time. Thus, many people criticized the makeup of the Commission as biased and having limited perspectives.
The Commission was convened as a public body subject to FOIA rules, lending an air of formality and constraining the free exploration of ideas among Commission members. One member wanted an informal dinner gathering for members to get to know one another but was not allowed to do so.
Commission members themselves heard or read hundreds of comments about the statues, but avoided discussing their fate amongst themselves until near the end of its six-month process. They then spent only an hour on this issue before taking a preliminary vote, and thus did not fully explore each of the options.
There was no interaction with City Council during the process, resulting in little understanding by Council members of the rationale for the Commission’s recommendations. That also meant that there was no opportunity for the Commission to respond to specific Council questions and concerns.
No expertise was invited to answer some of the biggest concerns, including what types of designs could transform the statues where they stood, or what could be done with the parks if the statues were removed.
Upon release of the Commission’s report City Council spent a number of meetings debating what actions to take. Eventually they voted to adopt all the recommendations and allocate substantial funding for that effort, with one exception. Rather than moving the Lee statue to McIntire Park they voted simply to remove it, leaving its eventual fate unknown.
A lawsuit was filed against the City and an injunction issued denying the City the ability to move the Lee statue or transform either one in significant ways.
Following the events of Aug. 11 and 12 2017 in Charlottesville, and at the urging of former members of the Commission, Council voted unanimously to remove the Jackson statue as well.
As of June 2019, the injunction against moving or transforming either statue continued with a trial date set for September 2019.
Despite the limitations of the process, the Commission’s Report is a substantial document reflecting the complexities and depth of passions evoked by the statues, their histories, and the many questions involved in deciding how to move forward. It likely will serve as a model for other communities for a long time to come.